“War Tattoos”, a project launched by Sergey Melnichenko in the spring of 2023, is a series of black and white photographs in which the subjects (mostly friends and family members of the photographer) appear in front of the lens against a backdrop of full-size projections of war footage. In this way, the author documents a visual record of painful memories, feelings and emotions – both of the people in the photographs and of the country as a whole.
Each participant chooses their own shot – the one that hit them hardest, caused the deepest pain and left an indelible mark on their memory. But making such a choice is an unbearably difficult task. After all, all Ukrainians have experienced so many terrible moments during the war that it is almost impossible to pick out the ‘worst’.
The photos of the horrors of war are projected onto the bodies and faces of the heroes, creating a new layer – a virtual “tattoo” that will remain with them forever. There are thousands, tens of thousands, millions of Ukrainians like them. Each of them has their own story, their own pain, their own war scars.
“Tattoos of War” is more than a photo project. It is a visual memory that speaks the language of light and shadow. Asked what kind of “tattoo” he would choose for himself, Sergei admits that he is not ready to make that decision yet. It will most likely be a picture of the house in his hometown of Mikolayiv, where his girlfriend Ksenia and his mother were killed by a Russian missile in September 2022. They were sleeping in their home. And they never woke up. “Mentally, I’m not ready for this shot. I have to gather my strength and it’s not easy,” says the photographer.
The series “Tattoos of War” does not just tell individual stories – it tells of the shared pain of the whole nation, helping us to feel more deeply the terrible reality in which Ukrainians have been living for more than three years as a result of Russian aggression.
The project is unique in that it conveys emotion not through the prism of dry documentary photography, but through powerful storytelling that combines conceptual and artistic photography. Each frame is a story of one person, but also a reflection of millions. Every Ukrainian today bears the “tattoo of war”.